>>20
I'm not
>>19, but you simply have no idea what true high level languages can do. You simply cannot convience what they can do and how practical they are. I could give you so many examples, but you probably wouldn't understand them, since you probably only know one(or more) low-level imperative languages, which limits the way you think about things.
I'll give you a practical example:
Error handling:
In C you call a function, and can get a result from it, you may also check the result against some magic constants to check for errors in the execution of your function. So you've conflated a return value with an error code, this isn't `the right thing to do'. What if I want error handling to be done transparently, and so that I won't have to spray my code with:
int status;
status = fun(...);
if (status == ...)
{
... handle error...
} else if (...) ...
actual_result_type actual_results = (actual_result_type*)status;
...
What if my return value may match the error code as a valid return code? What if multiple errors happened at the same time? What if I can't write a handler here as the actual logic which needs to decide on how the error should be handled is actually some place higher in the stack? What if I don't want to unwind the stack when using exception handling, because that would cause important information to get lost, and a continuable error may turn into a real error without it being one? What about being able to gracefully restart? And so on.
You want a real condition system! You want multiple return values, and not a hack which involves using pointer parameters to return values!
You cannot concieve what can truly be done, because your language limits the boundries of your thoughts. Even if you can do all these things in C, you'll never do them as they're
TOO MUCH WORK. Sometimes people actually greenspun such things in C, and create wonderful high-performance applications, but they usually take many years and dozens of contributors. Something which could be achievable in Lisp in months by one or two persons actually takes many years of work and dozens of contributors to reach that state.
I'll stop here for now, otherwise if I start talking about macros, compiler macros, reader macros, closures, the condition system, a truly dynamic environment and many other wonderful things, it will simply take too long.